Essentially, Virtensys was extending the PCIe bus in servers with their own cards to one of their three appliances. This allowed them to aggregate 8Gb FC and 10GbE resources, effectively reducing the requisite port counts in the switch fabric and related costs. It also eliminated the need to buy the costly PCIe HBAs for the servers (pairs, if you required redundancy). On top of that, they had a management layer that provided tuning and QOS-like features to allow throughput as required within the fabric for each server. Very cool!

So, I sent an email to Steve late in December, but I didn’t hear back from him. Surprised by this, I sent an email to his personal address (we are LinkedIn) and Steve replied back that he had left in November, that they were running out of money and were going to have an asset sale.

Last week, Micron announced their agreement to purchase Virtensys. You can read more about that here.

This is an interesting acquisition. Micron makes, among other things, PCIe SSD. These point products can be deployed for specific needs, making a huge difference in latency for the right application. They claim they can get up to 3.3GB/s in sequential reads and 715K IOpS in random reads. Very nice.

What I am curious about is if they plan to take advantage of the management layer that Virtensys had to provide virtualized SSD storage? Or, are they going to continue with the product-set that Virtensys had brought to the market, but with deeper pockets to sustain them through initial market adoption.

The first would be interesting, but the second I’d like to see. It seems they, and now Micron, may have a winner.

My first reaction was that I am familiar with that technique, but haven’t given it much active thought over the last several years. When I worked for a company that did CRM software development back in the early ’90′s, we did something similar. As part of the design of the application I led, we wanted to pre-populate look-up tables with various entries. Simply put, if a field was designated to be used for ‘Country’, for example, we wanted to makes sure all of the companies were pre-populated. Very straight forward. However, if you wanted to pre-populate the ‘Title’ field look-up table, for instance, or the ‘First Name’ field, this we accomplished by reading text in a computerized directory, parsing then indexing the text, to come up with a list of values that we could import into the respective look-up table. No great shakes.

More recently, back in 2003, TriAxis used a company that could take PDF-based directories and import the text into database fields. I still see them out there positioning their product as a way to glean data off the web for acquiring more prospects.

My second, and near immediate, reaction was one of violation. When one company surreptitiously goes onto sites in order to ‘scrape’ data, without permission or regard for whom the data belongs or from where the data is obtained, then I think that should be dealt with swiftly and decisively. The fact that they don’t ask if they can do this says they, corporately, would rather “beg forgiveness than ask permission”. We are too lenient about this, which is why companies don’t fear reprisal and continue to push the limits on data acquisition. Google still argues that it’s Wi-Fi scraping is “… for the good of its customers …”, although it claims it has stopped that practice. That type of mentality is reminiscent of why we have Obamacare, but that is not for this column…

So, we have the technology that can be misused. It’s all about having information that can be used to an advantage. So, the collecting and storing of all types of data will continue, because the technology exists to do so. It makes me think of the ‘Jurassic Park’ quote by Dr. Ian Malcolm, “Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

I believe the choice of whether we should or should not needs to be a decision made upfront, long before they did because they could.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this — maybe this is a bit of a rant. But I will conclude that, as long as the possessor of information sees power by possession, then these tactics will find new ways to proliferate. And we storage guys will continue to look at new ways to store, manage and protect it.

Why are they so negative? Do they fear prosperity?

Why don’t they say they look forward to the possibility of a sustained economic expansion? Isn’t that possible? If this feared possible double-dip recession is only a possibility, is it wrong for them to say that continued growth is also possible?!? The negativity of news drives me crazy!

But I prattle on.

Last week I began interviewing new candidates for specific roles here at TriAxis. I see light at the end of this economic tunnel. Despite the best efforts of our government to indebt us and act as a disincentive to job creation, the power and creativity of capitalism will win. That means more and more creative ways to store, manage and protect data will be required, developed and implemented. I need to make sure the staff at TriAxis is ready to meet this requirement. Hence, the interviewing.

Another aspect of this is to make sure I have the current (dare I cliché) ‘best of breed’ products available to our clients and prospects. One of the more interesting ones is from QuorumLabs, their continuity appliance they call OnQ. If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend that you do. If I can assist in that review, let me know. At any rate, I have my eye on an individual that resides on the ‘Gold Coast’ (Fairfield County, Connecticut) that may be a product specialist focused on OnQ. This will be the first time I’ve designated a field person as, essentially, an extension of another organization. We’ve assigned inside staff to specific manufacturers, but never field staff.

We’ll see how it works, but I believe the timing is perfect to embark on this type of vendor/reseller investment. Regardless of who is in the White House or on Capitol Hill, America’s power and incentive to grow GDP cannot be held down for long! And TriAxis will continue to be at the tip of the spear.